Tag Archives: functional programming

In the previous episode, I calculated the distance of flight. I will use it later for gathering statistics. Another metric, I would like to have is a time of flight. Usually, flight departure and arrival times are presented in local time. So it gets a bit tricky to get the time length when the journey spans across few time zones.

Elixir’s standard DateTime library doesn’t work with time zones very well. The Internet suggests I should use Timex.

But first I needed to make some changes into my database because up until now, I had only flight date. A few weeks ago I wrote a post, how to update your schema with migrations and this time I followed the same steps. Still, I haven’t figure out how to do it in a bit more automated manner.

defmodule Flightlog.Repo.Migrations.CreateFlight do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
alter table(:flights) do
modify :arrival_date, Timex.Ecto.DateTimeWithTimezone
modify :departure_date, Timex.Ecto.DateTimeWithTimezone
end
end
end

As you can see, I used specific Timex types. This works only with Postgre, and if you want to use timezones it needs one additional step. You’ll have to add custom type to your database:

And I’m calling it from the view in another function, so it’s easily accessible from the template:

def time(time1, time2) do
Flightlog.Math.flightTime(time1, time2)
end

And that was it. Although it took me few hours because I was struggling a bit with Timex types. I didn’t read carefully the documentation and for example missed the step with creating new Postgre type. Good lesson here, to look into docs carefully :)

The effect:

As you can see, I made some approach at formatting dates. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to show them in local time. They’re in UTC in here. This will be next step most likely.

That’s all for today. Next week we’ll try to test this new module. In the meantime, check previous episodes. And if you’re interested in machine learning, look into my weekly link drop.

In last two parts, I was setting up and consuming quick API to get additional airport data. One of this information was exact airport location on the Earth. In this part, I’ll use that information to calculate the distance of the travel and show how you can use standard math library in Erlang VM.

Calculating distance of air travel based on location is not super hard, but it needs to accommodate the fact that Earth is not flat. We’ll use something called “Great-circle distance“, as that’s how planes fly. So when you take most commonly used Mercator projection of the map, the shortest path between two points won’t be a straight line. It’s gonna have more parabolic-like shape. It’s best visible if you pick longer flights. Just go to flightradar24.com and check any plane overflying the Atlantic. They seem to be all flying towards north first and then turn south as the flight progresses. In fact, they fly a straight line, but because Eart is a sphere (in simplified model), meridians are not really parallel to each other.

After this geography primer, let’s get to math. The formula for calculating great-circle distance looks like that:

Where and are latitude and longitude of two points on Earth. This formula takes in radians and outputs radians. The result is angle difference between two points. To get the distance in kilometres, we have to multiply it by the radius of the Earth, which in the metric system is around 6370kms.

To the code! I changed my functions in view, so instead of returning separately latitude and longitude, they give back a pair of coordinates as a tuple.

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/0c934302b100a8b0f8899010fdd8422b

Then I pass the tuples to newly created function distance, that calls newly created Flightlog.Math module. I put the module in /lib folder and it all worked by the first run!

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/031d81a94c3302bb6be9068c8bc29345

:math is a reference to Erlang VMs math library. One thing that’s needs explanation is changing degrees into radians. Radian is a different mathematical representation of the angle. 1 radian means, that the length of the arc of the part of the circle, that this degree describes equals the length of the radius of that circle. So the full circle is slightly over 6 radians (2 * Pi), as a formula for the length of the circumference of the circle is 2 * Pi * radius.

That’s all for today. Next week we’ll try to test this new module. In the meantime, check previous episodes. And if you’re interested in machine learning, look into my weekly link drop.

As mentioned in my last week Elixir blog post, I produced some quick fake API based on Azure Functions. I thought it’s gonna take a couple of minutes, but it turned out to be a whole adventure in itself.

Fill all the necessary fields like App name (must be globally unique) or location. For hosting plan I used “Consumption plan” which means, I pay only for the time that function is running. I also like to pin my stuff to the dashboard, so it’s easier to find.

It will take several minutes to deploy.

Now you can create your functions for the app. F# is hidden in small print just above “Create this function” button. So click “create your own custom function”.

Then with Language drop-down, pick “F#” and for Scenario – “API & Webhooks”. There should be on the F# function triggered by HTTP request. That’s the one you want for API.

You’ll get premade piece of code with a simple function that is triggered by HTTP POST with name object and responses “Hello “.

Then I started writing the logic I wanted. I made an array of hard coded airport data. I made the function to accept only GET requests (you can change it in function.json file). In code, I parse query strings and get the airport IATA code. If I have this airport in my array, I response 200 with JSON containing the data. Otherwise, I return 404. If there’s no parameter in the query string, function answers with 500.

It’s relatively simple and straightforward F# code. I just struggled a lot with debugging. The small editor on Azure doesn’t give you static analysis, nor type information and no squigglies. You need to run the function and check for compilation errors or runtime errors. There was also some weird scoping behaviour, that forced me to declare the Airports array within the function. Anyways, after 2hrs I had an API that did what I wanted. You can see the code below. It’s not bulletproof, but it does the job. And I got to play with Azure Functions a bit.

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/5053aabbc1c6e76db082dc8daa952c81

If you want to read more about other types of F# Azure Functions, Mathias Brandewinder wrote recently two posts about timer and queue triggered functions.

That’s all for today. Tune in next week for another part. Also, check previous episodes. And if you’re interested in machine learning, look into my weekly link drop.

Last week I wrote about how to extend your Ecto model. I wanted to figure it out because I thought this week, I’ll add to mother other flight related data. Turns out, I did it in completely different way. Not sure if this is the correct approach, so feel free to bash mi in comments (in a constructive way!).

One of the data I have on my flights so far is a departure and destination airport IATA code. Those are 3 letters code, commonly used in civil aviation (SFO = San Francisco, CPH = Copenhagen etc.). I wanted to use some simple API to get more data based on this code. So I decided to write my own using Azure Functions and F#. It became a separate adventure. I’ll write another post about it.

When I had my API ready, I started figuring out, how to put it in Phoenix app. My first approach was a bit like you do stuff in ASP.NET MVC – adding those extra fields to the model, and trying to update them from within the controller. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t even access fields of the model.

The solution I ended up doing, is putting all the web calls and logic for parsing them within the view file. It feels dirty for me. It would be very dirty in ASP.NET MVC. So my intuition is, that it’s not the best way to do it. But so far the only one I made working. After those changes my Flight view file looks like that:

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/b00a756b891e701354cba66fae55bd78

And then I use those functions within the template that renders the view:

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/ecb3acf26baaad25d32f78af89080319

Immediately you can see another problem with the code – for every information that I want to show, I’m making a separate web request. But it works, which is a huge improvement. Done is better than perfect.

Screenshot to prove that it does, what it should:

That’s all for today. Tune in next week for another part. Also, check previous episodes. And if you’re interested in machine learning, look into my weekly link drop.

Last week I used Ecto models to quickly created the database and I was very surprised how all got generated for me. But the model I build was very simplistic, and now I need to extend it. I started working on first serious functionality for the project, and I’ll have to do some changes. For start, I’m just testing by adding one field.

I generated new migrations file in /priv/repo/migrations folder and a bit by trial and error I end up with file like that:

defmodule Flightlog.Repo.Migrations.CreateFlight do
use Ecto.Migration def change do
alter table(:flights) do
add :plane_type, :string
end
end
end

In the last episode of my Elixir adventures, I messed with own-made Views and Controller to display hardcoded flight information for my FlightLog. This week I’ll try to show data based on the content of the database.

Phoenix doesn’t have built-in data access capabilities. But there’s awesome Ecto project, that’s sort of beefed up ORM. It reminds me Entity Framework (or good parts of it) in .NET or Rails. It supports multiple databases, although the default is Postgres. If you generated your Phoenix project by default and didn’t exclude Ecto, you should have everything you need to start. If no, refer to this guide

To add data access to FlightLog, I started the way, I would usually do in a web project. I installed the database (I went with Postgres), created some table, inserted some sample data. It was proven later, that it wasn’t a necessary step.

To build your first model, go to your project root and type for example:

As you can see, this gave me a lot of stuff – a migration, a controller, a controller test, a model, a model test, a view, and a number of templates. It also instructs as to add new Controller to the router. Let’s do that.

I also removed recent additions, because they served the same purpose. I initially though I’ll just edit them, but Ecto surprised me by doing everything for me. Updated route file looks like that:

This created tables for me as defined in phoenix.gen.html. I noticed that database has some extra fields for basic journaling like inserted_at and updated_at. I logged into the database and added some data just to have something to show and fired up my project again:

mix phoenix.server

When you browse to the site, you’ll notice that not only I have a list of flights, but also buttons for actions like Edit, Delete or Add a new item. All generated for me and even with decent styling. That was a very nice surprise.

So first look at Ecto is very positively surprising. It created all the boilerplate code for me, but it is also a code that’s understandable and easy to edit. There seem not to be any underlying magic. If I need to change default behaviour I feel I wouldn’t have much problem doing that. We’ll see in future if practice will support those claims.

Last week I mixed new Phoenix project and looked how different parts of framework fit together. This week I started adding my own routes and pages. I followed the official guide but altered it a bit to better fit my application.

Adding a Route
First things to change, when you’re adding new pages, is the router.ex file, that sits in the web folder in your project. All of the work today will be contained within web folder. To add a new route, simply add a new line within the existing scope. We’ll talk more about scopes in one of the future episodes.

What the new Route says is, when browser hits /flights path, index action of FlightsController controller will be executed. Or in other words, this routes maps GET request for /flights to the index action of FlightsConroller. This won’t work because this controller doesn’t exist yet. Let’s fix it!

Adding a ControllerThe Controller is very similar to the one I created last week. Nothing new here. We have index function that renders index.html view.

defmodule Flightlog.FlightsController do
use Flightlog.Web, :controller
def index(conn, _params) do
render conn, "index.html"
end
end

Adding a View and a TemplateAs you can see below, I added some code to the Template. I’m quite sure that it should be handled in View, but for now, I hard coded it this way. Below flights_view.ex and index.html.eex:

defmodule Flightlog.FlightsView do
use Flightlog.Web, :view
end

https://gist.github.com/mlusiak/059a840dcf17493e50c215b54f2dcdc4

You can also see reference to the path /flights/1 that has not been declared. Let’s do it now.

Adding another Route, Controller and Template
I pasted below the code for all three files, marking changes in bold.

There are some important things happening here. In Router, I pattern match against the params passed into the show function so that the id variable is bound to the value we put in the :id position in the URL. For example, if our URL is http://localhost:4000/flights/1, the id variable would be bound to 1.

In Template, I again hard coded some logic. There are for sure better ways to do it, but it works for now. It’s worth mentioning, that id passed is a string! I debugged this for an hour while comparing to integer 1 and couldn’t figure out why it doesn’t work ;). Everyday you learn something new. And the effects:

http://localhost:4000/flights/1

http://localhost:4000/flights/2

As you can see it’s all rendered within parent template. I’m not gonna get bothered by this at this point.

This week I decided to push some things in the project. Instead of looking into the internals of Elixir and Erlang VM, let’s actually do something. My project for DSP competition is a web application, and most popular framework for web development in Elixir is called Phoenix. Phoenix use as it’s foundation Erlang’s HTTP server – Cowboy. I’m not gonna look into it right now, I don’t think it will be necessary at this point.

More important for now will be knowledge what is Plug. It is a specification for constructing modules, that can be composed together and configure how web applications behave. Modules and functions that are built to this specification are called Plugs. Plugs can be chained together to create pipelines and can handle nearly everything, i.e. authentication or parameter pre-processing. To learn more look into this guide.

Thanks to Plugs, Phoenix doesn’t have a need for a monolithic middleware. And you can customise every step of handling a request. Let’s look at the elements that handle a request up to rendering, step by step.

The Endpoint is responsible for handling request until the moment that routes take over. Which includes starting server, applying the configuration and also applying a set of plugs that are common for all requests.

The Router is responsible for a few things. First of all, it parses incoming requests and sends them to appropriate Controller and Action. You can also create Pipelines here, which are sequences of Plugs, that can be easily applied to routes. So on top of common plugs, you can add your own. For example, to differently handle requests that will be rendered in a browser, vs. API requests.

Controllers do what they usually do in MVC model. They provide actions, which may prepare data for views, render stuff (through Views) on screen or do redirects.

Views are presentation layer. They’re rendered based on Templates. Templates in Elixir are precompiled, which makes them very fast.

CodeArmed with those basics, let’s look at some code that’s generated when you start Phoenix project.

First what I did is mix new Phoenix project instead of previous one.

$ mix phoenix.new hello_phoenix

This caused some havoc in my repository but I managed to clean it up. After this and few other steps, like setting up a database, I could start it up.

$ mix phoenix.server

After that I could navigate to http://localhost:4000/ to see my first Phoenix application:

You can notice declared separate pipelines for browser and API. The one for browsers has accept-headers for HTML, handles session and adds anti-forgery tokens. One for API is much simpler. Then inside of scope (which is out of the scope of this post :P) you can see this pipeline applied and route for “/” declared that will trigger PageController’s action named :index.

defmodule Flightlog.PageController do
use Flightlog.Web, :controller
def index(conn, _params) do
render conn, "index.html"
end
end

This renders a view based on template located in file index.html.eex.

Next week I’ll start working on the code and adjust the routes for my own needs.

More resources

If you interested into looking Phoenix yourself, their documentation is very good, especially the guides. I also watched this video from 2015 NDC Oslo by the creator of Phoenix, Chris McCord. It gave me good overview how things work in Phoenix.

Thanks for reading this another part of my adventures with Elixir and Phoenix. Come next week for more. And if you’re interested in machine learning, look into my weekly link drop.

I was planning to start furiously coding on my project for this second post and start building some web API with Phoenix. But Gutek suggested, that first I should really dig into some internals that will help me understand how Phoenix works – thanks for this advice. On top of that, I didn’t really have time to dig properly, but I managed to look a bit into syntax and I have mixed feelings.

I won’t be doing an introduction to Elixir post here. You can find a lot of resources on that, for example, Gutek’s series in Polish, official documentation or this short article. Instead, I’m gonna compare it to something that I’m familiar with – F# syntax. And it’s nowhere near comprehensive comparison. Just a few things that I found interesting and worth noting.

Comparing stuff

Right from the start, there are few differences here. F# uses just ‘=’
to compare if two things are equal. Elixir has two comparison operators ‘==’ and ‘===’. First one is standard compare operator. Second, from my current understanding, is useful mostly for comparing if numbers are of the same type. To explain, look at this example:

Elixir is dynamically typed. It means, that it will also infer types, but this will happen in the runtime and also will do casts for you.

For not-equal F# uses ‘<>’ and Elixir ‘!=’ and ‘!==’. Generally, Elixir is here more consistent with most programming languages, so I’ll give it a point here, but I appreciate type safety of F# also. You can also notice that those languages use a different convention for comments.

First thing that came to my mind when saw it, were C language pointers :)

F# allows mutability, but it has to be openly declared, and then you need a different operator to change the value. Mutability is mostly allowed for compatibility reasons with .NET libraries, so you shouldn’t abuse it.

In this part, F# is for me clear winner. You cannot change value bind to a label. It is much less confusing and makes more readable code.

List operations

List operations are generally very similar. What I found interesting in Elixir, you can match not only head and tail, like in F# but several first elements:EDIT: As anonguy pointed out in the comments, that’s also possible in F#. Updated the code sample.

# Elixir
[ a, b, c | tail ]

// F#
head::tail
a::b::c::tail // that also works

There are two things worth mentioning while we’re on lists. Pipe operator (|>) works pretty much the same in both languages. In Elixir it binds the first parameter of the function, and in F# last one, but that’s the main difference. It’s a matter of convention and doesn’t really matter in the end. Just worth knowing.EDIT: as Chris and Paul Blair pointed out, this has a tremendous impact on how currying and partial application works and makes F# much easier in that regard. Check out the comments for details.

The classic approach to lists is that you usually iterate through them with for loop. It’s possible in F#, but Elixir doesn’t have “for” loop. You have to do it in a more functional way, i.e. through recursion. For me, that’s a huge plus on Elixir side, because it forces you to use proper functional approach. In F# for loops are a gateway drug to imperative programming :).

Functions and modules

The first thing that I find annoying in Elixir is that every ‘def’ and ‘defp’ must be paired with ‘end’. It’s like curly braces all over again. Or Visual Basic. It makes code dirty and is excessive. In F#, blocks of code are delimited by the level of whitespace, similar to Python.

In Elixir, functions must be wrapped in Modules. It doesn’t create a big pain, but again – something I don’t have to do in F#. On the other hand, Elixir allows you to do multilevel Modules, which may be convenient in some situations.EDIT:Anil Mujagic mentioned in the comments, that it also works in F#.

Pattern matching

A bit about Elixir pattern matching was mentioned in the first paragraph. “=” parameter has some impressive qualities. You can also pattern match on function parameters, like shown below in the second example. And you can further simplify it with guards.

In F# it looks similar to the case statement in Elixir. You can also use guards with it and much more.

// F#
let x =
match 1 with
| 1 -> "a"
| 2 -> "b"
| _ -> "z"

I couldn’t recreate the same example easily, because of strong typing of F#. The Same variable cannot have values of different types, and nulls are non-existent in this language. You could have something similar using discriminated unions.

I’m not a fan of Elixir’s approach to this problem with declaring several functions. I prefer F# way again.

Summary

As mentioned in the beginning, I have mixed feelings. For the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing a lot how beautiful Elixir is. And I can imagine for a lot of folks coming from other languages it is. But I’ve been spoiled with F# for last 5 years and I must admit, it’s still my number one. That being said, Elixir lands on the strong second position in terms of beauty. I do appreciate some big uncompromising design decisions that José made to make Elixir much more functional. F# has some “gateway drugs” to imperative programming, as they wanted to leave that option open too and be compatible with the rest of .NET. Big points for Elixir for that. There are some features of F# like discriminated unions or units of measures, that I haven’t found a good replacement in Elixir, but I’m also at the beginning of my journey. I also like F# more for strong typing.

Additional resources

F# has an abundance of operators. Some of them are really crazy. Check this Microsoft document to see all of them.

Quick guides on Elixir and F# syntax. The second one comes from the excellent blog of Scott Wlaschin. If you want to dive into F# more, I highly recommend it.

Next week I’ll be diving into internals. Hopefully, I will find time for that. Come back next week for more Elixir, and if you’re interested in Machine Learning, check my subjective drop of interesting articles in that area.

This post was edited to fix inaccuracies that were pointed out in the comments. Thank you for kind, constructive and informative comments!

Wow, 1.5 years since last post passed quickly. Time to do something about it!

I’m taking part in Maciej Aniserowicz’s “Daj się poznać” contest. “Get noticed” in English. It’s a competition for programmers aiming at promoting technical blogging and building open source projects. Throughout next 12 weeks, participants have to write at least 2 blog posts each week. And at least one of them should be related to the project they’re building and hosting on github.

I’ll be writing one technical post related to the project at the beginning of week, usually around Monday or Tuesday. On Fridays I’ll be posting news and links to interesting resources in area I’ve been exploring last few months – machine learning. I’ve been thinking for a long time about some way of gathering interesting use cases, scientific papers, presentations and online courses. This way it can be beneficial to others. First round on Friday.

My project won’t make world a better place, but hopefully I will learn something. My main goal is to play around with Elixir, Phoenix (web framework) and some frontend technology (haven’t decided yet if it’s gonna be React or Elm). I will be building clone of the flightdiary.net. It’s a web app, where you can log flights you’ve taken, and you get nice map and statistics.

For start, I created repository on github, installed elixir and setup IDE with plugins. I’m using Visual Studio Code, as it became my go-to editor. I do all my F# and Javascript stuff there, and there’s also great plugin for Elixir written by Mat McLoughlin.